The “WatchESPN” mobile app update is ruffling a lot of feathers

ESPN has been making a big push over the last year with their WatchESPN app for mobile and tablet devices. The concept is nifty, allowing those with cable providers who subscribe to the service (pay extra to ESPN), to stream live and archived video content to their phone or tablet.

This comes in handy when at a friend's house during a big time college football game and somehow his manlihood has reduced to a point where he has to watch a DVR'd episode of Psych with his fiance instead. Psych is terrible btw.

Unfortunately for ESPN, a recent update to the app seems to have rendered it useless to a good chunk of users. Most all of the reviews for the newest 1.6.2 version are 1 star, and half the reviews for the app in general are 1 star out of 17,000. That's not exactly what you expect to see from a multi-billion dollar corporation.

The vast bulk of reviews since the update pushed last week read like this:

"Worked great before new upgrade. Now it does nothing but crash.'"

"Crashes and more creashes and I'm not talking about Nascar!"

"Crashes as soon as you try to watch a video"

"Nice Update! Now I can't use this on my Iphone. Can't wait to see what the next update brings! Go ESPN!"

These are pretty much the only comments you find since the update went into effect.

Streaming live video over the internet to mobile devices is pretty complicated and things can obviously go wrong. That said, they had an app that was working well and somehow the testing of the new update wasn't extensive enough as nobody seems to be having any luck with the new version. If this was a startup or a side project of a developer, it wouldn't be a big deal. But when it's ESPN and football season is days away, a failing WatchESPN app is probably something you want to be a bit more diligent about.